The Windows at Macy's

My long-time cyber buddy in London, Jackie, has requested that I wander out of my taxi into the crisp December air and shoot pictures of all the major department store windows in NYC. Great idea - so here we go...

There are five huge department stores in New York: Macy's, Saks, Bloomingdale's, Bergdorf Goodman, and Lord & Taylor. In the next few weeks, I'll post pictures of all of them. I have the advantage of being up all night and so I can get shots without any people blocking the view. During the day - faggeddabowdit. These windows are major attractions. Sometimes you have to wait in line just to walk by.

Let's start off with the biggest display of all - Macy's.

Next up... Bloomingdale's. Stay tuned.

Pssst... hey, buddy, wanna see some post cards? Click here!

One-Eyed Dog

All right, it's time for the next dog.

Riding with me from Tribeca to Greenwich Village one night last week were Gracie, a seven-year-old mixed breed, and her owner, Eric.




I'm finding a lot of the dogs in my cab have interesting biographies, and Gracie was no exception. Before winding up in the care of Eric, she spent the first three years of her life in a basement in Queens, never seeing the light of day. Definitely a cruelty to animals situation.

But she was rescued by Eric and things were fine until it was recently discovered that a bump near her right eye was cancerous, and the eye had to be removed. So Gracie has what looks like a furry patch covering the socket where the eye had been.



Eric said her years in the basement affected her socializing skills with other dogs. But she does well in the socializing with humans department. Her special skill is standing on her hind legs and hugging you for no apparent reason, as if you were a long-lost friend.

I'm considering doing the same thing to increase my tips.

New Blog!

Ladies and Germs, may I have your attention please?
Announcing my new blog - Pictures From A Taxi.
I do a lot of "street photography" while driving my cab - most of my shots are taken while waiting at red lights. Originally I thought I would include some of these pictures in this blog (Cabs Are For Kissing), but now I think that rather than post pictures that have nothing to do with the text, it would be a better idea to start a second blog that would be just photography. It will be one picture every day from various sections of New York - a city, by the way, that is like heaven for street photography.
Your comments are welcome, of course!
Hope you will visit often for a dose of New York as seen (literally) through the eyes of a taxi driver.

Pigs Fly

Taxicabs in New York City have meters that register what the passenger has to pay in four different ways:
1) The first drop. You sit down, tell the driver where you want to go, he pushes a button on the meter and that is the first drop. It's currently $2.50.
2) The distance traveled - 40 cents for each fifth of a mile, which comes out to two dollars per mile.
3) Any surcharges. This is a separate amount added on at the end of the ride. There are two surcharges: one dollar if you get in a cab during the evening rush hours (4 to 8 PM, Monday through Friday), and 50 cents if you get in a cab from 8 PM to 6 AM (the "night charge").
4) The clock.


This post is about the clock. This is a charge for time sitting still or when moving very slowly. We just had a rate increase for the clock on Nov. 30th - the first time there has been such an increase in SEVENTEEN YEARS! It had been 40 cents for each two minutes. Now it has doubled to 40 cents for one minute. The last two rate hikes, in 2004 and 1996, raised the prices for the distance traveled and the first drop only. You actually have to go all the way back to January of 1990 since the waiting time was increased.

I had been telling people that the best deal in NYC was to get in a taxi and then don't go anywhere.

The city agency which makes up the rules and sets the rates for the city's 13,087 taxis is the Taxi and Limousine Commission. This agency has had a history of keeping taxi rates in NYC relatively inexpensive, usually much cheaper than in other U.S. cities. It also has a track record of ignoring the need for cost-of-living increases by letting huge chunks of time go by between rate hikes (like eight years) and then, when the rates are finally raised, to hit the public with a whopping increase (like 30 per cent) which pisses everyone off. By anyone's standards, this would be called "bad management".

Now we get a modest increase (the average ride will only cost about 10 per cent more) after only two and a half years since the last one. The public will hardly notice it and the drivers will be able to keep up with the cost of living, at least for awhile. Plus, taxi owners were not permitted to raise their leasing fees, which means the money goes directly into the pockets of the drivers.

It could almost give you the idea that the Taxi and Limousine Commission is showing signs of competence and fairness.

The Wrong Guy

In my last post ("Doctor Evil") I mentioned someone whom I realized I once had in my taxi back in 1999. You know this person, too, or at least you know of him. You may have never seen his face, but you have spoken of him from time to time.

Has something like this ever happened to you? You are walking on a crowded city sidewalk in a pretty good mood, just minding your own business, when someone walking in the opposite direction bumps into you and knocks you off balance for a moment. But instead of apologizing to you or asking you if you're all right, he turns back and says, "Get the fuck out of the way, asshole."

Or this? You are waiting in line at the QuickChek and someone a foot taller than you blatantly cuts right in front of you with his beer just as you were about to step up to the cashier. You think of saying something to the guy but he looks like a thug, so you just keep your mouth shut and stand there with your half-gallon of milk.

In both cases your urge to react in a forceful way is suppressed by the consideration of what the consequences might be if you did. You might be injured. Hell, you might be killed. You might be arrested and charged with assault. You might have a lawsuit on your hands.

So you stand there and take it. But you soothe your anger by thinking this thought: "Someday that guy is gonna meet the wrong guy." The wrong guy is not you, so you let it pass. But you know he's out there somewhere and it's just a matter of time before he evens the score with this sub-human who was just so incredibly rude to you.

It was the "wrong guy" who got into my cab that night in 1999. I had taken a fare out to Jackson Heights in Queens at midnight on a Saturday night and was heading back toward Manhattan on Northern Boulevard. Suddenly a man came running to the street waving his hand at me. I stopped the cab, he got in, and we drove off.

The first thing I noticed about him were his physical characteristics. He was short - maybe 5 feet, seven inches - thickset, muscular, probably close to fifty years old. He appeared to be Hispanic-American and spoke without an accent.

The next thing I noticed was that he was in a state of extreme agitation. Without any prior conversation these alarming words came shooting out of his mouth: "FUCKING BASTARD! DAMN FUCKING BASTARD!"

"What's the matter?" I asked.

His answer startled me again. Not only because of what he said, but the way he said it. He actually started to cry.

"Oh my god," he sobbed in a lowered voice, "I hope I didn't kill him."

"What happened?" I asked.

"THAT STUPID FUCKING BASTARD!" he screamed. "WHO THE FUCK DOES HE THINK HE'S TALKING TO? I WAS IN NAM, I DON'T HAVE TO PUT UP WITH THIS SHIT!"

"What happened??"

My passenger began crying again. "I think I killed him," he blurted out as he covered his face in his hands. "Oh, God, I hope I didn't kill him."

To say that this guy was "upset" would be an understatement. He was riding on a wave of emotion that went up to anger and down to grief like a yo-yo, back and forth. He was literally inconsolable. It took the full ten minutes of the ride for me to piece together what had happened.

He'd been sitting in a bar, alone, minding his own business. Just having a couple of drinks and brooding to himself about his own troubles. Three rowdy guys entered the bar and sat nearby. One of these guys decided it would be a good time to have some fun at my passenger's expense. He began making belittling comments at him while his buddies laughed. He wouldn't let up and it led to a brawl.

The fight was no shoving match. It was an outright slugfest which ended with the rude guy collapsing on the floor from a chop to his neck which may have crushed his windpipe. He gasped desperately for air before slumping over, unconscious, possibly dying. My passenger ran out of the bar to the street looking for a taxi. My cab became his getaway car.

What the sack of shit didn't know when he decided to forget his manners was that he had finally met "the wrong guy". His object of ridicule was an ex-Marine who knew martial arts and was in no mood to take crap from some punk.

When we arrived at his destination, I advised him not to talk to anyone else about this incident other than a priest. Not to let his feelings of guilt put him into a jail cell. He thanked me and disappeared into the night. I never learned any further information about what may or may not have happened that night.

I found it interesting to observe that, although he may have just killed someone, I felt no fear in being alone with him in my cab. He wasn't my wrong guy. I don't have a wrong guy because I don't go around intentionally insulting strangers.

But we've all met people who do. And it was fascinating to meet the guy they will eventually run into.

Doctor Evil

Halloween is a special time in New York City. It's one of the most celebrated holidays of the year (even though it technically isn't a holiday at all), right up there with Christmas, Thanksgiving, and the Fourth of July. If it falls on a weekday, as it did this year, there are actually two Halloweens. The first is the Saturday before Oct. 31st, and the second is Halloween itself. The Halloween parties occur on the Saturday. The Halloween parade in Greenwich Village (which drew nearly a million people this year) and the children trick-or-treating take place on Oct. 31st itself (a Tuesday this year).

I'm telling you, it's a big deal.

One of the things I find fascinating about that day is how quickly people can adjust themselves to a new reality. Some guy is walking around dressed up as a pack of cigarettes and some girl is crossing the street in a bumblebee outfit and nobody looks twice at them. Because it's Halloween. I think if suddenly the accepted fashion became wearing a red ball over your nose like a clown it would seem perfectly normal within just a few days.

Anyway, now that I'm blogging I thought I would take pictures of all the people in my cab who were wearing costumes

like these guys

and this guy

and maybe have a best-costume-in-my-cab contest. But an incident occurred at around 2 AM of the first Halloween night (Saturday) that took away all my enthusiasm for taking pictures of people dressed up like draculas, batmen, and wicked witches of the easts. And for a couple of days I was in a rare funk, hardly communicating with anyone at all.

Disturbing incidents almost always breeze right over my shoulders and glide on out into the universe. After 29 years of taxi-driving I have developed an immunity to them. I even look at the occasional jerk who gets in my cab as being a part of the Parade of Humanity and try to find something about him that interests me. But this particular jerk on Saturday night... this guy... he must have slipped in through a crack in the floorboard. He really got to me.

Even so, the truth is I wouldn't choose to write about it if I didn't have a point to make. And the point is this: the thing we call "civilization" is held together with a glue called "restraint". Here's what happened...

I picked up three thirty-something people - two girls and a guy - coming out of one of the trendy clubs on 27th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues. They were all in costumes. The guy wore a red, white, and blue jumpsuit which I thought was supposed to be some kind of super-hero thing like Captain America, but it turned out to be an Evel Knievel (a famous motorcycle stuntman) outfit. In fact, the guy even looked like a young Evel Knievel. The girls - I don't know what they were supposed to be, but they were wearing fishnet stockings. Their destination was Murray Street in lower Manhattan.

I thought I would strike up a conversation with this group as I was interested in taking their picture at the end of the ride. But it was one of those fares in which the passengers were just into themselves and had set up a mental barrier to keep the cab driver out of their world. And most likely they'd been drinking or were on drugs. I asked the guy early in the ride if he was Captain America and got a reply not from him, but from one of the girls, that he was Evel Knievel.

But other than that there was no communication between us during the ride. I had already decided against asking them to pose for a picture and just drove along listening to the radio and wasn't paying much further attention to them, except to notice that the guy and one of the girls, who I assumed was his girlfriend, were bantering with each other and it was souding like an unpleasant, low-level argument.

It was when we arrived at their luxury high-rise on Murray Street that things suddenly got ugly.

The meter was $11 and the guy tells me he has to go into his building to get the money. This is bad taxi etiquette because he has waited until the end of the ride to make the announcement. If he'd been by himself the immediate suspicion would be that he's trying to beat the fare. But since he was with the two girls, it was no big deal. The girls wait in the cab with the meter running until he gets back with the money. Happens all the time. As long as he doesn't take too long, it's not an issue.

But then, without any explanation to me, he orders the girls out of the cab, telling them to wait on the sidewalk until he gets back.

What??

In all my years, no one had ever done this. It struck me immediately as being completely out of bounds and I turned around in my seat a bit to tell them that normal procedure was for the girls to remain in the cab until the money arrived. I had to raise my voice slightly to be heard as I was being ignored. Then, quite out of nowhere, Mr. Knievel went ballistic on me.

Now I am not one to repeat vile profanity, but if I was, this is what I would tell you he screamed at me:

"No, they are getting out of the cab, you fucking piece of shit. They're getting out of the cab, asshole."

Whaaat??

Needless to say, I was stunned. If anyone ever talks to me that way, which is never, I would probably know what had provoked it. But this came out of the blue. He ushered the girls out of the cab and told them to wait right there and then started walking toward his building.

"What do you think I'm going to do, drive away with them?" I said to him before he was out of earshot. Some sarcasm was the best I could come up with.

"That's exactly what I think you're going to do, you fucking piece of shit," he called back, and then walked into his building and was out of sight.

It's one thing if some moron is a semi-coherent drunk and throws an insult in your face. You know he's drunk and can be tolerated. But Evel wasn't semi-coherent. Evel was evil. The suddeness of his verbal assault and the perception that he knowingly wanted to humiliate, belittle, and degrade me restimulated an anger that was powerful enough to make my hands tremble. It's the kind of anger that can immediately escalate into violence, with the point to be made being, "You can't talk to me like that!" It's the kind of anger that brings you right to the precipice - the desire to strike back vs. the consequences of striking back suddenly becoming a monumental struggle. It's the stuff that manslaughter is made of.

The two girls who were now standing on the sidewalk up to this point had not said a word. I vented some of my anger by telling them their friend was the most insulting person I'd ever met and wasn't a candidate to live a long life. And then one of them shed some light on the situation. She told me that the other girl standing there had been in a taxi a couple of weeks ago and passed out in the back seat. She woke up to find her driver molesting her.

Whoa.

Okay, that was terrible and I told her I was sorry that happened. But it didn't excuse his acting like an asshole as, obviously, I wasn't that guy. And I told her that. Which maybe wasn't the right thing to say as now she felt a need to be defensive on his behalf and so she starts to critcize me for being mad at him. I was becoming numb with rage and realized I'd be better off just getting the hell out of there, so I told her to tell Evel Knievel he could keep his fucking eleven dollars and I shifted the car into "drive" with the intention of leaving.

But she wanted to keep the game going. She leaned her body against the side of my cab and latched onto my side-view mirror, making it impossible to drive away without knocking her over. And then she said something which turned out to be fascinating: "He can pay the fare and he can buy your cab, too, if he wants to, asshole. He's a plastic surgeon and makes plenty of money."

At this point Evel - "Doctor Evil", the plastic surgeon - returned with the money. He came up to me on the side of the cab, taking the space where the girl had just been. Now, in retrospect, you would have thought the guy might have cooled off and possibly might have even been apologetic for the way he'd spoken to me or would have at least offered an explanation for his incredibly bad manners. But instead he just continued where he'd left off.

"How much is the fare, you fucking piece of shit?"

A crisis point had been reached. My desire to strike back at this guy, to see him lying on his back in agony as my foot stomped down on his nose (requiring plastic surgery) had reached a crescendo. It wasn't really his words that infuriated me. It was the unmitigated evil I perceived in him. I wanted to hurt this guy very badly. But before I tell you what happened, I'm going to step out of this scene for a moment and do a bit of reflection.

Whenever I've had the misfortune to run into somebody like this, it has always amazed me how they could live past the age of, say, twenty-five. Because the odds are against it. You go around insulting total strangers - somewhere down the road you're going to meet "the wrong guy". And that guy is going to kill you, Charlie. Just like that. It's sort of a filtering process that the human race has installed upon itself.

Consider this: I am a total unknown to Dr. Evil. He has no idea what my tolerance for being insulted happens to be. He has no idea that, although it is illegal for taxi drivers in New York City to carry weapons, various objects that are associated with the operation of the vehicle, such as a tire iron, for example, can be used as weapons. And that I have just such an object at my fingertips. He has no idea that, although I am not a big guy, I have the ability to put him in either a hospital or a hole in the ground within seconds. And he is basically begging me to do it.

So... what did I do?

I drove away without saying another word and without accepting his money.

And, as I said, I was in a funk for about two days. You didn't really want to be in my cab during that time. Not that I was rude to anyone, I just wasn't my usual semi-cheerful self and certainly didn't want to have a conversation with you. I was too busy playing and re-playing every detail of the incident in my mind. But the mental mass associated with the episode finally did move away, and I was glad I had come away from it losing only some pride and not facing charges of aggravated assault or murder.

Plus I did have an insight that I'd like to share with you.

In reviewing this guy's behavior, you might think, yeah, well, he was just upset because one of the girls he was with had been assaulted by a cab driver. But it doesn't ring true. Obviously, one person in a profession is not another person in the same profession. And this guy wasn't lacking an ability to distinguish that. What he was doing was seizing an opportunity to dramatize some kind of transgression that he himself was guilty of while trying to make himself look righteous in the eyes of his friends. His behavior was a facade.

How many times have we seen it turn out that the righteous person on a crusade against evil-doers was himself guilty of the same crimes he rails against? I had inadvertently learned that this guy was a plastic surgeon. Isn't that someone who might find himself in a position to molest unconscious females?

Dr. Evil would be wise to wear a sign around his neck that says, "The reason I'm insulting you is because I have committed crimes I don't want you to know about". That way, when he meets "the wrong guy" - as he will - perhaps his life will be spared.

Three Unlikely Intersections In New York City

There are certain signposts in this city that make you look twice...

In the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn people are wondering... Bill? Or Hillary?

Rumor has it that Larry Flynt is planning on opening a new Hustler Club at this intersection in the Financial District.

In Greenwich Village this street intersects with itself.

Living With Maurice

Here's a truly amazing observation about New York: I estimate that there are about 800,000 to one million dogs living in the city. This number is reached by figuring that roughly one person in ten has a dog (8 million people = 800,000 dogs). And yet there is virtually no dog shit on the streets. None!

And that is amazing. Hell, that's a miracle.

This was not, however, always the case. Way back when, dodging doo was a part of every New Yorker's day. But the pooper-scooper law (the living legacy of Mayor Koch) made not cleaning up after Rover a social faux pas. Today, every New Yorker walking a dog knows that the eyes of the citizenry are upon him. Fail to bathe for a month, root for the Red Sox, beat your wife, walk around with a Bush/Cheney button on your coat - hey, all right, these things can happen. But fail to clean up after your dog... you just try it, mister!

I actually think the level of civilization of the people of a city can be judged by this alone. Along with their pizza. Take Paris. I'm told that the streets there are a fecal minefield. And that there's no pizza.

All of which brings me to my latest taxi dog.

Maurice, a seven-month-old Boston Terrier, and Eric, his twenty-something owner, jumped in for a short ride from the East Village to Union Square recently. Maurice, like Julian the Maltese whom I wrote about in "Mail-Order Dog", is also a mail-order dog. Eric and his girlfriend found Maurice online and bought him from a breeder in Oklahoma. The price was $400 plus $100 shipping. The pooch was met at LaGuardia Airport, taken to his new home in the city by Eric and girlfriend and they've all been living happily ever after since.

Except for one thing. Although Eric described him as a good companion, he is walked three to four times every day, and he does use the wee-wee pad conscientiously, Maurice is still not completely housebroken. He may leave an occasional surprise in the apartment.

But never on the street!

Ghostbuster

Usually when you pick somebody up at Penn Station, if you happen to have a conversation with that person, you will be told they are coming in from Boston, Philadelphia, New Jersey, or upstate New York and they are here either on business or to visit their sister. So when a young lady got in my cab recently and told me she'd spent the day hunting ghosts in Perth Amboy, it got my attention.

Her name was Lindsay May, and this was her story...

The Proprietary House http://www.proprietaryhouse.org, an old mansion in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, is haunted. Expeditions are available for people who want to get up close with the spitits. The house dates back to colonial days when it was used as the residence of the royal governor of New Jersey. The last in the line of the royal governors, by the way, was William Franklin, the illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin, who sided with the British against his father's wishes. Franklin was arrested after the Revolution began, spent a couple of years in jail, and eventually went to Britain, never to return. (Who knew?)

Anyway, the house has had various incarnations since then, including being used as a barracks during the Civil War and as an orphanage. So it's had plenty of opportunities for disembodied spirits to settle in. And apparently they have.

Lindsay May told me devices called EVPs (Electronic Voice Phenomena) are used to record ghostly sounds. And that during the day she at one point walked through a ghost and at another point was swept into a room. She had no doubt whatsoever that the place is indeed haunted.

I dropped her off at 5th Street and Avenue C in Alphabet City. An area of the New York which, I must say, by my own observation is also somewhat haunted.

The Case of the Missing Beard

It was busy as hell last Saturday night. One of those nights when, even though all of the city's 13,087 cabs were out on the streets, demand still exceeded supply. So when I dropped off a passenger at Waverly Place and 6th Avenue in Greenwich Village at 1 AM, I wasn't particularly surprised to find two people, both females, desperately trying to gain possession of my cab. 

They arrived simultaneously from both sides and I found myself suddenly playing the role of referee. I chose the girl on the left as she had arrived a moment before the other, and the girl on the right didn't take it well, calling me an anal aperture and threatening to report me to the taxi police. But I chose well because the girl on the left turned out to be a sweetheart and left me with a story. 

But the ride didn't start out well at all. She directed me to drive just a block away and stop in front of a three-story apartment building. Which I did. She then got on her cell phone and began a conversation that went something like this: 

GOTL (Girl On The Left): Hey, it's me. 

(pause) 

GOTL: C'mon down. I'm right here. I've got a cab. 

(pause) 

GOTL: Come on, honey! I'm right downstairs. I'm right here! 

(pause) 

GOTL: Pleeease! 

(pause) 

GOTL: Dammit, come on, please! 

(pause) 

GOTL: ...please...please...please...please... 

It went on like this for two or three minutes, and I'm thinking I could have been to Midtown already with the girl on the right. One thing you do not want to do when the city is super-busy is sit around and wait. A cab driver makes very little money sitting still in New York City. So I began to express my discontent to my passenger - and then she did something I really didn't like. She suddenly opened the door, said she'd be right back, got out of the cab and went into the apartment building. Without paying me what was already on the meter. 

Not okay!

Three more minutes went by. I was just about to drive away and write it off as five minutes and a few dollars lost to a whacky girl who had no regard for the rights of others when, to my surprise, she reappeared. Looking downcast and dejected, she asked me to drive her to a bar on 30th Street and 3rd Avenue. By this time my curiosity had been aroused, so I began asking questions. And this was the story... 

My passenger, whose name was Jamie, had been talking to Jed, her boyfriend, on the cell phone. She wanted him to come out with her to this bar, but he wanted to stay inside. When she wasn't able to convince him to come downstairs, she went up to his apartment to try to persuade him. But Jed wouldn't budge. Both Jamie and Jed are twenty-one years old. They both go to Pace University, and they've been dating for about a year. Well, the guy sounded to me like a jerk. Here was his girlfriend begging him to come out with her on a Saturday night, and he won't go. Not what you'd call creating the relationship. 

But there was more to the story. Jamie told me that for as long as she's known him, Jed had always had a full-grown, thick, red beard. In fact, she'd never seen him without it. And neither had any of their friends. Then, a couple of days earlier, Jed suddenly went and shaved it off. And now no one, including Jamie, recognizes him anymore. She'd always related to him as a guy with a beard - it was his main identifying characteristic - and, now that the beard was gone, it was like he was a different person. Not really. But sort of. 

Apparently it was all too much for Jed. He'd decided to stay in his apartment and watch the Discovery and History Channels, perhaps forever. But Jamie couldn't stand the idea of sitting there and looking at another documentary about World War II, so she was going to that bar on 30th and 3rd by herself. 

After learning the whole story I found myself softening up on Jed. He now seemed to me to be something like a Woody Allen character, and I mentioned this to Jamie. She brightened up and agreed that he was, in fact, Woody Allen-ish, and spoke adoringly of him. So she really does like this guy, with or without a beard. 

Which just goes to show that true love is stronger than whiskers.

Interview With The Vampire

New York "characters" - I've got one right here. This is a guy who has actually been driving me crazy for years. He cruises around the city very late at night in a fake cab, stealing business away from legitimate cabbies. Whenever I've seen him on the street, it clicks off some kind of vigilante instinct in me. I have followed him around for miles, waiting for him to stop for someone hailing a cab on the street so I could intervene. I once sent the cops after him.

When I say "fake cab", what I mean is this: he drives around in a yellow Ford Crown Vic that has a rooflight on the roof and rates posted on the doors. There is a meter on the dashboard. It looks just like a real NYC taxi. And, in fact, it is a taxi - but it's not a New York City taxi. It's registered somewhere outside the city limits and cannot legally do business in New York.


Fortunately there are very few of these cabs around. And they don't usually seem to last very long. I might see a guy driving a fake cab once or twice (an experienced eye can pick them out) and then I never see him again. But not this guy. As I said, I've been seeing him for years.

A few weeks ago I was cruising up 1st Avenue at around two in the morning and there he was. I didn't have a passenger in my cab, and neither did he, so I set off after him. I followed him for about a mile, and then I had an idea. I realized he'd make a good interview for the blog. I mean, here's a guy who could be thought of as being the underbelly of the underbelly in New York City. Kind of like a vampire. He comes out late at night and sucks the blood from the economy of the already overworked legitimate cabbie, and then disappears when the sun comes up. It might make good copy.

So I did something extraordinary, considering that I'd been this guy's nemesis for years. I pulled up next to him and said hello. I didn't speak angrily or condescendingly. Just some taxi driver chit-chat. I showed him my digital camera and asked if I could interview him and take some pictures. And he was totally obliging. In fact, to put it mildly, he was quite eager to talk. It was as if he'd been on a long, long journey and here at last was someone who was willing to listen to him. We spoke for over an hour.

I've always had an appreciation of the character who is a likable scoundrel. The Falstaff character. The rogue who takes short cuts around the law but does no serious harm. And this guy was him. His name is Marvin. The image you see of him here is exactly the way he has looked for all the years I've seen him on the street. Same hat. Always a lit cigar in his hand. And his cab perpetually filled with smoke. (His passengers must love that.)


His mode of operation is this: his car is, in fact, licensed to be a taxicab in a town in Westchester County. Getting the license wasn't difficult. All he had to do was open a post office box and fill out some forms from the town clerk. He doesn't work for a taxi company. He's just a one-man-band in business for himself. He does have the insurance required to operate a taxi business (although he sometimes lapses on the payments).

Marvin has a few steady customers up in Westchester, but what he mostly does is drive down to the city and cruise the streets late at night. He tries not to be noticed. His rooflight, like NYC taxis, is illuminated when the meter is off so potential passengers will notice that he's available. But, unlike New York taxis, his rooflight is set up so that you can only see the illumination from the front. From the back, the rooflight is dark. This means that taxi drivers coming up behind him will think he's already got a passenger in his cab and won't think of him as competition. Sneaky. And clever, I must admit.

His way of charging for his services is sneaky, too. Marvin has rates posted on his doors that look just like the decals that are attached to the doors of New York cabs. But upon closer inspection it turns out the rates he's charging are higher. NewYork taxis are currently authorized to charge 40 cents for a fifth of a mile. Marvin charges 40 cents for a sixth.

It is, of course, illegal for any vehicle other than a real medallion taxi (the yellow taxis you always see in pictures) to pick people up on the street. But it's not illegal for a taxi from another town to come to the city and simply drive around. So for Marvin to actually get in trouble, his act of picking up a passenger from the street must be witnessed by a cop or a Taxi and Limousine Commisssion officer. And that is why he is careful not to be noticed. He usually cruises only on streets where there are no other taxis around. And certainly no police cars in sight. Marvin does a lot of looking in his rear-view mirror.

I was curious how he wound up in this racket and he told me his story. He had been a legitimate NYC taxi driver back in the early '80s and, in fact, had owned three medallions. (The medallion is the license from the city to own one taxicab and to operate it according to the rules of the Taxi and Limousine Commission. The medallion can be bought and sold by individuals and are quite valuable, today trading for over $300,000. Like houses, they are usually purchased by taking out a loan from a bank or a credit union.) But he ran into financial problems with his partners, couldn't make his payments on his loans, and lost the medallions. Disgusted and broke, he kept driving one of the cabs without a medallion. Eventually he was caught, arrested, and fined. But what flipped him over to the "dark side" was that he was spoken to rudely by the TLC officer was caught him. That was the final straw.

Since then, Marvin has been a renegade cabbie. But what amazed me was how long "since then" has been - 1984! In other words, Marvin has been cruising the streets illegally and making some kind of living at it for over twenty years. He said he'd been caught a few times and has paid a few fines. But nothing that would stop him from continuing. To me, that is amazing.

I felt a certain amount of admiration for the guy. I myself had once owned a medallion and found dealing with the city and dealing with my drivers to be unendurable. And here was Marvin kind of giving the finger to "the man". But my admiration was abbreviated when Marvin, blathering on, perhaps told me a bit too much. He pointed to his taxi meter, which was not like the ones we use in the city, and bragged that he has it rigged with something that is called a "zapper". That means that whenever a hidden button is pushed, the meter clicks. So Marvin's passengers are winding up paying about double what they would pay if they were in a real NYC cab.

"Why hit a single when you can hit a home run?" was Marvin's justification for doing this.

Well, that was where he lost me. It's one thing to screw the system and get away with it. It's another thing in my mind to victimize your own customers. My opinion of the guy dropped like a stone when he told me this. Still, the thought of Marvin brings a smile to my face. He is a character. Even if he is a vampire.

Female Trouble

When a guy with flowers in his hand jumps in a cab at four in the morning and says he's in a big rush to get to 25th Street and 1st Avenue, it can mean only one thing - female trouble.

Here's what happened: Tyrone does event planning and had organized a party for clients earlier in the evening. His fiance, Amanda, had thought she would be able to go to this party herself but it turned out she could not get in. She told Tyrone it was okay, no big deal, and went home while he stayed and worked the event. But later in the night, when the party was finished, they spoke on the phone and Tyrone detected that Amanda was in fact a bit upset about it. Result: flowers, particularly sunflowers which Amanda is fond of, and an emergency taxi ride to 25th and 1st.



Some of the best advice I ever heard about maintaining a relationship is to never go to sleep over an upset. Tyrone must have heard this advice, too, or just have great instincts, because he didn't treat this as a trivial matter. Getting Amanda un-upset was top priority. Now if she does the same for him, these two are going to have a very hamonious marriage.

An interesting thing about Tyrone, by the way, is that he speaks Italian fluently. He told me both his parents are half Italian and half black and he grew up speaking both English and Italian. He had some amusing stories about being among Italians, overhearing their Italian conversations, and then shocking them by revealing (in Italian) that this black kid understood everything they were saying! It reminded me of a fare I had a couple of years ago in which an Asian girl was speaking in Russian to her friend. It turned out she was from one of the former Soviet republics. It wasn't a language I would ever have expected to be coming out of her body.

So, Tyrone... how about a comment about how it turned out with Amanda that night? My millions of readers want to know!

Pictures From Ground Zero, 9/11/06

Each year on the night of September 11th the "ghosts" of the Twin Towers appear at Ground Zero as twin columns of laser lights that shine upward into the sky as far as the eye can see. It's a starkly beautiful remembrance of the buildings themselves and of the events that occurred there. Driving my taxi around the city that night, I took some shots of the lights from various vantage points and wound up stopping at Ground Zero at 3 AM to pay my respects.

From 5th Avenue as it enters Greenwich Village.

An artsy kind of shot taken from the 59th Street Bridge.





The source of the lights turned out to be from the roof of a parking lot above the entrance to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel.

Ground Zero is four blocks in length. The gargantuan pit can be viewed from behind a fence on the Church Street side.

The one person I knew who perished that day was Debbie Paris, the wife of my old friend Jim Marrash. I remember Debbie as a caring and lovely person.

One of the items displayed on the fence surrounding Ground Zero was this collection of pictures and messages from children in an elementary school in California. It contained this bit of advice...

9/11 Stories In My Cab

I am often asked by passengers where I was on 9/11. I tell them I have two answers to that question and they are both truthful: a) I was at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11th, and b) I was home asleep on Sept. 11th.

I drove a night shift on Sept. 10th, 200l. The shift started at 5 PM and ended at 5 AM. At 2 AM during that shift, then Sept. 11th, I picked a woman up in Greenwich Village and drove her to the PATH train entrance of the World Trade Center on Vesey Street. The PATH train is an all-night subway that runs to New Jersey. It was just a routine ride. I drove for another three hours that night and went home. I live alone and didn't know about the attacks until my daughter came over and informed me of it at around 3 PM. I was actually getting ready to go to work, having no knowledge of what the rest of the world already knew.

And yet, oddly enough, I can say that technically I was there that day. The idea that eight hours after dropping off that fare at the WTC the towers would cease to exist still strikes me today as unfathomable. Anyone who ever stood at the foot of one of those buildings and looked up would fully understand that. It just couldn't have happened.

The weeks that followed 9/11 were, of course, a special time in New York City. I drove a cab relentlessly during those weeks, barely taking a day off, feeling a sense of obligation to carry on. It was a time more than any other time when people needed to share what they were going through. I would just ask "How are you doing?" when anyone got in my taxi. What came back more often than not was a flood of communication and emotion.

One of the aspects of the tragedy that still amazes me is how many people it involved directly. Momentous events do not always involve many people. The JFK assassination comes to mind. But the events of 9/11 entangled everyone who lived in New York City. Thus, everyone has a story. I heard many of those stories in the months that followed. Some of them have stayed with me.

There was a young man who told me how he was climbing up the stairs from his subway station just beneath the WTC and, having no idea that a plane had just crashed into one of the towers, was confronted with a scene of chaos instead of the usual sights on the street that he was so used to seeing as he reached street level. He likened it to opening a familiar door and suddenly finding yourself in Dante's Inferno.

There was a woman from a church group who told me they were caring for several children from a daycare center near the WTC whose parents had never come to take them home.

There was a young woman who worked on the 10th floor of the first building to be hit who told me that the initial attempt of the people on her floor to evacuate had been thwarted because there was a fire in the part of the lobby where the staircase was located. Burning jet fuel had dropped down the elevator shafts and was burning in the lobby. Everyone had to go back up the stairs to their offices. Not knowing what to do, she crouched under her desk and prayed, basically paralyzed with fear. Eventually a second attempt to leave the building was successful, as by that time the firemen had arrived and had put out the fire in the lobby. But as she filed out of the building with the others, they were ordered to walk forward and not look back. Bodies of people who were jumping from the top floors were landing in the plaza and the police were trying to spare the people who were leaving the horror of seeing this.

There was a fireman who told me how he had barely escaped being killed by the debris of the collapsing first tower by taking refuge under a fire truck. He commented that many people have said that the events seemed like scenes from a Godzilla movie but he thought it was more like scenes from SAVING PRIVATE RYAN.

And there was a ride with two other firemen who told me, as we passed a firehouse on Amsterdam Avenue at Sixty-Sixth Street, that every fireman from that station had died.

Most of the stories I heard were told to me within a year of 9/11. It took about that much time for most people to have said all they had to say to whomever needed to hear it and for individual lives to be moving forward again. But the eeriest story I have yet heard was actually told to me just a few months ago.

I picked up a 30ish man on 57th Street and 3rd Avenue at around midnight one night last April. He put some light luggage in the trunk and we started to drive to his destination at West End Avenue and 83rd Street. He told me he'd just been dropped off there on 57th Street by the driver of an airport shuttle bus and was pissed off at the driver because he wouldn't take him all the way home. He was a flight attendant for American Airlines who had just completed a long day's work and wanted to get home without a hassle. Now he had to pay for a cab ride.

I've always thought that his job was intriguing and adventurous, so I found myself asking him the same question that is often asked of me: "What was the wildest thing that's ever happened to you?" Here's what he told me.

He said he used to be based in Boston and that Flight 11 from Boston to Los Angeles was a regular run for him. Flight 11 was the plane that flew into the north tower of the WTC. Had it not been for his own good fortune he could easily have been scheduled to work that flight. But he wasn't penciled in that day. The crew who perished were all friends of his.

He said that he did work that flight on Sept. 3rd and was scheduled to work it again on Sept. 13th and Sept. 17th. On the Sept. 3rd flight one of the passengers, he said, was Mohammed Atta, the leader of the hijackers. This was confirmed by flight records, but my passenger didn't need to have his memory tweaked when he was interviewed by the FBI. He remembered him.

He said that Atta was traveling alone and was noticed and talked about by all the attendants during the flight due to oddities in his behavior. He would not make eye contact with anyone. He spoke to no one. He wanted no food, drink, or anything from any of the attendants for the entire six hour flight. In short, he stood out. He did not seem at all like a normal passenger.

I found the story encouraging in a way. It bears out what a veteran prosecutor in NYC once told me about the possibility of crime in a taxi cab: "the one you think it is, it is". For all their evil brilliance, the hijackers were still not clever enough not to be noticed by the people who work the planes day in and day out.

I've always remembered that advice.

The Giving Directions Hall of Fame

Two or three times a night a car will pull up to me at a red light and a stressed-out-looking face will appear from behind an opened window and ask me - sometimes almost beg me - for directions. I like to think of myself as a civilized human being so, of course, I always do my best to help. These are usually pretty mundane occurrences, nothing to write about, but there have been a few that have stayed in my memory as being particularly amusing. A "Hall of Fame" of giving directions, if you will.

1) Man in a Chevrolet at 6th Avenue and 12th Street: "Where is 45th Street?"
Me: "Between 44th and 46th Streets."

2) Woman in a Subaru: "Do you know where the Hilton Hotel is?"
Me: "Yes."

3) Young guy in a Jeep: "What's the best way to get to Wall Street?"
Me: "Go to a good business school."

4) Young guy in a Mercedes: "What's the fastest way to get to the FDR Drive?"
Me: "Helicopter."

5) Man in a VW Rabbit on 3rd Avenue at 85th Street: "How do I get to Canada?"
Me: (seeing that he has an opened map on his lap and is not kidding): "Go straight 'til you hit Vermont, then make a left."

6) Girl in a red Toyota: "How do I get to Saks?"
Me (not sure I heard her): "What?"
Girl (louder): "Where's Saks?"
Me (realizing there's a joke here and now pretending not to hear her): "WHAT?"
Girl (shouting): "WHERE'S SAKS?"
Me (still pretending I'm not sure if I heard her): "You want... SAKS???"
Girl: "YES, SAKS, I WANT SAKS!!!"
Me: "My place or yours?"

My great regret is that no one has ever pulled up to me and asked this exact question: "How do I get to Carnegie Hall?" In case there's anyone in the world who doesn't know the answer, I will tell you now. It's practice, practice, practice. (This was the first joke ever written in the history of jokes, believed to have been authored by Milton Berle's grandfather.) So you see the kind of wise-ass I am. A closet comedian desperately in search of a laugh.

But there's nothing less funny to a cab driver than what happened to me a few days ago. I was sitting at a red light at the intersection of Chrystie and Delancey Streets in the Lower East Side when a police car pulled up next to me on my left. There were two cops in the car, as usual, and the officer sitting in the passenger's side of the cruiser ordered me to lower my window. "Oh shit," I thought, "what the hell do they want?" The possibilities for misery immediately raced through my mind. Do I have a headlight out? Is the stupid light above the rear license plate out? Did I make some kind of illegal turn back there at Rivington Street? Did I run a red light? I couldn't think of anything I'd done wrong, but who knows what they think? Jesus, this could cost me hundreds of dollars and put points on my license. And that could mean my hack license could be suspended and it could raise the cost of my car insurance.

I lowered my window and braced myself. The cop had a sour expression on his face. He looked like maybe he hadn't eaten in a long time, and maybe he'd just had to intervene in somebody else's family crisis, and maybe he'd just been dissed by some thug on the street - and now he was going to take it all out on me. His mouth opened. These words came out:

"Do you know where Monroe Street is?"

That is correct. Perhaps for the first time in the history of taxi-driving, a taxi driver was asked for directions by a cop. I proclaim this to be some kind of vague moral victory not only for myself, but for taxi drivers everywhere.

I looked at the cop. He looked at me. My perception of him and his plight changed instantly. I saw him now not as a menace, but as a modern-day version of Officer Toody from the old sitcom, CAR FIFTY-FOUR, WHERE ARE YOU? I had to like the guy, but I couldn't resist rubbing it in a little.

"So you're asking me for directions," I said with a broad smile. "That's a switch."

"We're from uptown!" he said, the implication being that the Lower East Side might as well be Madrid or Budapest.

"Oh, okay," I replied. "Well, make a left on Delancey and a right on Allen Street. Monroe runs into it in about ten blocks."

"Got it."

I was on a roll. I saw an opening for a parting shot before the light changed, and I took it.

"Listen," I said, addressing both of them with mock seriousness, "I want you to know that there's no need for what just happened here to ever be known to anyone but the three of us. Your secret is safe with me."

"Thanks!" the officer sitting closest to me called out as the light turned green and they made the left onto Delancey.

Okay, so I lied.

Mail-Order Dog

Dogs in cabs. It's a genre of its own in the world of taxi-driving. As for me, I love it when someone gets in with a dog. Right away, there's an instant conversation. Anyone who owns a dog in New York City loves to talk about their canine pal. No exceptions. In fact, I read somewhere that the easiest way to meet a girl or a guy is to strike up a conversation with them while they are walking their dog.

But many cabbies, for reasons I don't fully comprehend, will not allow dogs into their cabs. Perhaps it's a cultural thing, a consideration that it would be an insult to their own dignity to give service to an animal. Or maybe there's a fear that the dog would mistake the back seat for a fire hydrant. Or maybe it's that here's a chance to pass someone by legally. (NYC taxi drivers are not required to accept animals in their cabs unless they are service animals, like seeing-eye dogs, or unless they are in a carrying case.)

I have never refused a dog and I've never had a dog piss or puke in my cab. People, yes. But dogs, never. Only twice have I had a problem. Once a guy left his Doberman (named Rambo) with me in my partition-less cab while he jumped into a deli. The dog became agitated and started barking and snarling. That was some serious tension. And another time a couple of girls in the East Village brought in a wet, long-haired mutt they had just found on the street. The lingering odor was so bad, I had to use a can of air freshener to disguise it.

When you consider that hundreds of dogs have passed through my portals without incident, the percentages clearly indicate that dogs make good passengers. Once, in fact, I had a celebrity dog in my cab. It was a black lab who had just done a "stupid pet trick" on the David Letterman show - he was able to hold some large number of tennis balls in his mouth. Think about this: here was a dog who was known to millions of people. He'd had his five minutes of fame. Hey, I haven't had my five minutes of fame. Have you?

This all leads me to tell you that I had a "fare of the night" recently who was a dog.

He was a one-year-old Maltese named Julian traveling from 69th Street and Broadway to 71st Street and 3rd Avenue with his owner, a twenty-four-year-old brunette whose name I neglected to write down on my trip sheet and now am not sure of, but I think it was Jennie. (Correction: not "Jennie"... it was "Jessica". See comment. Thanks, Jessica!)

I was told an interesting story of how these two hooked up. They actually met online. Jessica had been shopping on her computer for a Maltese puppy and located a breeder in Alabama who had one. The transaction then occurred, other than from pictures on the internet, sight unseen. Julian was shipped by air to New York and met at the airport by Jessica. (Kind of like a mail-order bride, except a dog.) The cost was $1,200 plus $200 for shipping. Jessica had recently completed grad school and had received enough money as gifts to pay for her pet. So Julian was really a graduation present.

You know how they say dogs and their owners are supposed to look like each other. Well, obviously these two don't look like each other, but they did seem to fit to each other. They made a charming pair.

Three Stars

So, did you recognize the movie star? It is... drum roll, please... Susan Sarandon. It may have been difficult to recognize her without her red hair anywhere in sight. Only about half of the dozen or so passengers in my cab whom I showed the pictures to got it right. One passenger, a dancer from Flashdancers, the strip club, didn't recognize her but did immediately comment on her cleavage, which I myself hadn't noticed up until that point. We are all experts in our own fields of endeavor. Speaking of which, here is the newest addition to the streets of New York. The Toyota Prius taxicab.

This is, of course, the hybrid electric and gasoline car which is great on fuel and low on pollution. I asked the driver how much he spends on gas per shift (about 140 miles are driven in a shift, the ultimate in stop and go driving). He said from 8 to 10 dollars. I'm spending between $40 and $50 in the Ford Crown Vic I lease from my garage. Wave of the future? I sure hope so. But how will it stand up to the brutality of driving on New York streets? That remains to be seen. It's a small car.

Now, down to business. The focus of this blog is the "fare of the night" or the "thing on the street", meaning the most interesting people I encounter in my taxi or something I see on the street that's worthy of mention. And here's one I wanted to write about. On Aug. 2nd at 1:30 AM I picked up a happy, young lady in Greenwich Village and drove her out to Astoria. She had been talking excitedly on her cell phone for awhile and when she finished that conversation I asked her what was going on. She told me she is the manager of a restaurant in the Village and they had just received a favorable review in the NY Times. Three stars, as a matter of fact.

Unless you are already familiar with the culture of fine dining in New York City, this may not seem like such a big deal. But I assure you, it is. This is how it goes: someone at some point in his (or her) life realizes that he loves to cook. He may very well have attended and graduated from a culinary school (no small accomplishment). He works for years as a chef in an excellent restaurant. Finally, with investors lined up and with many friends to help him, he takes a mighty plunge and decides to open his own place. Enormous planning and effort are put into this project.

At last the restaurant becomes a reality. But will it be a success or just another one of the many flops? This often depends on a single, fickle, and perhaps fair or grossly unfair variable: the review of the food critic of the New York Times. If the reviewer likes your restaurant, your chances of success have multiplied dramatically. If not, your entire endeavor is most likely headed where the potato peels, egg shells, and fish bones wind up... That's the power of the food critic of the NY Times. So there is real drama here.

My passenger, whose name is Sara (and whose birthday it is) filled me in on the behind the scenes details of the story. She works at the Blue Hill restaurant on Washington Place between 6th Avenue and Washington Square

Park. It's a cozy, little place in the below-ground-level of a townhouse which has been in business for six years. The special feature of Blue Hill is that they prepare only food that has been grown within 150 miles of New York City. Blue Hill had received a two-star review ("very good") from the NY Times when it first opened and, Sara told me, if a restaurant is still in business after six years, it is the policy of the Times to review it again. They'd been informed that a food critic would be dining there that week, but they didn't know what day and they didn't know who it would be. So there was an air of mystery, suspense, and excitement in the restaurant all week. Was the portly gentleman at table twelve actually the mighty reviewer from the Times? Or could it be the woman in the pink suit at table seven?

The moment of truth had arrived earlier that evening. They received word that the review of Blue Hill would be published in the August 2nd edition, and they had received 3 stars ("excellent") from food czar Frank Bruni. The ecstasy of the staff had to be contained as the last diner stayed in the restaurant for an excruciating 45 minutes after the check had arrived. Finally the patron departed and they all celebrated their significant win.

Another example of increasing my own reality by communicating with a passenger. I wouldn't have known anything about all this if I hadn't simply asked her what was going on. If you'd like to see the review for yourself, by the way, google "Blue Hill restaurant, New York City".